What breaks WP Super Cache

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Technology

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General Techie Stuff

Disclaimer: This blog post is not meant to be timeless, meaning it will lose its relevancy as soon as the stuff I’ll mention below gets updated. I will do my best to keep up with the updates, and delete this blog post as soon as it becomes irrelevant.

I then started on a “Google mission” to see if I could find reasons to why this was happening. As far as I could see many people were having this same error and it seemed to have started inexplicably.

I found some people were reporting that the error started to happen after they’d installed JavaScript minifying plugins.

I do have one of those plugins, but after disabling it, my cache still wasn’t working. However, this convinced me the problem could be related to some other plugin I had installed.

I decided to go on and disable every single plugin in my blog, except for WP Super Cache. I then confirmed this was the problem, as my caching started to work again.

There were 20 plugins installed, and I decided to activate all the ones that’s were less likely to cause a conflict; such as administrative tools, email management and form processing.

That left me with about 10 plugins to investigate.

I started to enable one by one, and found that what was causing my cache to fail, was an advertising plugin I had, that I used to display textlinkads.

More precisely, TextLinkAds on versions 3.9.7 and 3.9.8. It was then easy to find a post reporting this exact same problem. The only way around it is disabling the plugin. In my case, it was a no-brainer choice between giving my blog a massive performance boost, or making a few bucks showing sponsored ads, but I guess you’ll have to make a call on that yourself.

Like I said, I presume the authors of TextLinkAds will fix this incompatibility soon, and I’ll remove this blog post as soon as they do so. In the meantime, I think it’s worth having it here so other people can benefit from it.